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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Remove meticulous. I’m watching 15 year old equipment fail on a daily and the solution is to keep running it. Failing to plan is planning to fail no matter what mental gymnastics you pay a consulting firm to do for you after your layoff 10% of your open office mouth breathers and 50% of your neck down workers.

    Businesses seem to have really gotten caught buying their own bullshit. If the numbers are so good and your OEE is so good, you don’t need that labor overhead. So they reduce the headcount. Problem is the numbers are all made up and someone whose ass was in the fire is now maybe safe for another few months. Multiply that by a few other “engineers” or whatever intern they pawned serious work off onto and you get a lemon.

    I’ve been doing this a very long time and I’ve seen business struggle for all sorts of reasons. No one’s trying to steer the cart away from the cliff anymore. Why admit fault and get laid off when you can bullshit and get laid off? That’s worst case. Bullshit and keep your job? Gravy.



  • It’s not nearly as bad when you view it from a parent because for every team there’s probably not more than 2-3 really shitty, vocal parents. And usually they can be kept in check by other parents (peer pressure can and should still be a thing when used correctly at any age level, it just takes proper leadership).

    When you are on the other side all you get to see and interact with 75% of the time at best is the ugly, loud and rude. Full blast.




  • This last job (I’m a contract employee) will be my last in MFG. I was hired long term (2 years) to get a gsk/haleon site to add almost 40% more deliverables. 280 million units a year to 400 million. Reduce waste by 25%, CoA/CoE turn around down to 2 weeks from 6.

    The labs, which operate almost entirely as a community (eg no real rigid structure, lots of senior empires) killed it. 7 day turn around which honestly now my mind. Packaging was a struggle once i pointed out that OEE can be improved by scheduling downtime rather than just oopsing it (strictly beancounter bullshit).

    Manufacturing… Took my ideas, literally threw them in the trash in front of me and said they have experts from multiple countries, they don’t need my help. Cool, i still get paid so whatever. You wanna see the biggest dumpster fire ever… Laid off about 40% of the mfg work force, rolled out some bullshit trainings about operators and maintenance working to bring equipment “back to new” whatever the duck that means (means maintenance budget is gone) all while investing 0 dollars into repair and maintenance. Gear boxes leaking oil into overflowing catch cans for months. Vacuum traps actually pulling ingredients out of the batches, building more systems upon systems that they can’t validate. Cleans that won’t pass swabs, cleans that aren’t validated, processes that rely 100% on operators to transcribe SCADA data into an electronic batch record system.

    Never seen anything like it but i know when a horse is dead and this one was dead before i got there.


  • The more time i spend in manufacturing environments ( I spend all my time there) the less i see actual product being the finished good. Business are setting themselves up for this autopilot pipe dream of “AI gonna fix everything” marketing/engineering utopia and in reality all it’s doing is dividing your operations crew and management. They are neglecting equipment, default mode of compliance is non compliance because of awful processes and quality cutbacks (staffing staffing staffing) and at the end you get a product that’s probably not gmp but who cares it’s shipping.